Paul Downs, author of Boss Life and NYT Small Business Blogger Interview – SBS 83

Small Business show, episode number 83 for Wednesday, September 7, 2016. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business Show. The show by, for and about small business owners here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean.

How are you, sir? I'm good, man.

How's it going?

Good, good, good.

So I'm sure it's a busy day for you. You guys, you're just wrapping up another podcast with all the Apple announcements, I imagine.

That's right, actually. And between that one and this one, I squeezed in a gig gab podcast because we were running late on that this week. So it's been a. It's been a crazy day. But yeah, yeah, all the crazy new iPhone 7 and watch 2 and AirPods and everything else has been occ. Morning.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. I'm looking forward to getting it. But hey, I'm really excited today. You know, we've talked about this book, Boss Life a few times on the show and how it had such a profound impact on me and, you know, hearing another business owner's, you know, really true, transparent story. And we're fortunate enough to, you know, be joined today by Paul Downs, owner Paul Downs, custom conference Tables, the small. Former small business blogger for the New York Times and author of Boss Life. Paul, thanks for joining us today.

It's my pleasure.

Yeah, we're. I'm stoked to have you on the show and really glad you give us some of your time today. Talk about your business a little bit before we get started and, you know, just tell our listeners, you know, how you got started, what your main focus is. For those of them who have not read the book, even though I've been yelling about it for the last three weeks, okay.

We are a manufacturer of custom conference and boardroom tables. We deal mostly with sort of big, complicated projects and we sell to big organizations, the government, medium sized organizations, small organizations, and just about everybody who needs a custom conference table. I've been in business for 30 years now, and I started when I was quite young, fresh out of college. Started off making furniture for the residential market and then made a transition into office furniture in the early 2000s. And we currently employ 19 people and we do about 3 million a year. I have a 35,000 square foot workshop just outside Philadelphia. And that's us.

Nice. So before you got into that front of your business, did you work somewhere else? Did you have training? Or was it just something that you love to do and thought, hey, can.

We, you know, make I never had been. I. I'm not one who's really well suited to working for other people. And I started the company when I was 23 years old. I had no experience in furniture at all, but I had a lot of experience in working with my hands when I was younger. And I got into the furniture business because I had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania architecture program and was thinking of going on to get a graduate degree and decided to work construction for a summer. And I was a carpenter's helper for a gentleman who really wanted to be a furniture maker. And he was always going on about how great that would be, and he made it sound so good. I was like, dang, I'm going to try that. So I had a small amount of money that I had inherited from my grandmother, a couple of thousand dollars and a lot of confidence. And I just decided I was going to give it a spin. And so I put together some tools in a shop and started making things. And, you know, that's how many people start making furniture. But most of them go broke pretty quick. And I was fortunate in that I was able to not only build things, but I'm pretty good at designing, and I was persuasive, so I was able to talk customers into giving me money. And that was the start of the business. And over the years, we grew and added employees. And so here we are today.

That's great. So fast forward a number of years. How did you get involved with the small business blog on the New York Times? What was the connection there that got you involved in writing with them?

Well, it's sort of a funny story. So like most businesses in this country, we grew in the early 2000s, and then we really got into trouble in 2008 when the recession arrived. And at the, you know, In August of 2008, I had 23 employees. And by October, I cut that in half. I had delayed half the guys off, and that was kind of an awful day. And then throughout 2009, our business was just dwindling and dwindling and dwindling. And by the end of the year, I was down to six employees. And I was pretty sure that I was actually about to go out of business. This was mid December 2009. I was down to maybe 3 or $4,000 in the bank, and we had no orders on our books. And I started thinking, oh, my goodness, you know, I'm actually going to go out of business. What am I going to do? I'd been my own boss for 24 years, and I was trying to figure out what would actually happen, what it would be like to drive a business into the ground, and went on the Internet and started looking around for anybody who talked about this and really found nothing. Like, literally nothing. Now, all those years leading up to this moment, I had been a reader of the New York Times and particularly its online edition. And in the summer of 2009, they had launched a blog in the business section called you'd're the Boss. And it was aimed at small business owners. And the editor had rounded up a bunch of contributors who were either small business owners writing about their experience or people who were consultants basically writing about their specialty. And it was the usual business advice in that, you know, like, here's someone who says, I'm so smart and I'm so rich, and here's what you should do, which is fine, but there's never anything for someone in my position. So I actually wrote an email to the editor and said, I love your blog. It's very interesting, but you don't have any contributors who talk about failure and what it's, you know, what happens when a business goes under, and that's about to happen to me, and I'm willing to write about it. And I made that offer because I was thinking literally that in a couple of weeks, I would have nothing to do, no place to go every day, and I wanted to have something, you know, something to do. And also figured that since I hadn't found any information about this, that it might be useful to try to share it. So I sent this email and. And I got no reply, of course. And a couple of weeks went by and I actually scraped my way through the end of the year and got one big order on New Year's Eve, and we kept the doors open. And the beginning of 2009 was still pretty difficult, but just trickling in business kept me from going out. And then two months after I wrote the email, I actually got a reply from the editor, a guy named Lauren Feldman, who's my good friend now. But he said, wow, you know, I just stumbled across your email. I don't even normally look at my email because it's so full of crap, but I saw this, and it's a really interesting idea. What would you write about? And so I sent him back one and said, oh, my goodness, I've had so many, so many trying experiences. Cash flow and bad employees and fighting with my partner and laying people off and the economy, you know, where do we start? So, long story short, I went up and had coffee with Lauren at the New York Times. And he said, okay, you know, I've never had anybody offer to write this story. It sounds like you're legitimate business, and if you want to do it, if you can write, you're hired. And I was like, well, okay, I'll give it a go. I'd never been a writer before. The only writing I ever did was just emails begging people for money. And so I wrote a few sample columns, and lo and behold, it turned out I'm a decent writer. So I got hired and I started writing for the Times.

That's a great story, man. There's so many in there. I wanted you to finish it, but I wanted to jump in, like 100 times. Just the concept of, hey, I may be failing here, maybe I should reach out and start telling people about it is so foreign to most of us because I think the natural thing is just to kind of hunker down and not talk about it.

Hide until you're successful. That's right.

Yeah. Right. Well, I. I gotta say that I made the offer to write anonymously. I thought that that would.

Oh, nice.

This makes more sense. Yes.

Well, yeah, that. That would be better for me because I could be candid about whatever happened to me.

Yes.

And it would be better for, you know, whoever's reading it because it wouldn't just be bullshit. And the issue we ran into is that the Times does not publish anonymous content. And so when the offer came to write, it was like, put your name on it or go away. And so I was like, what the hell? I've never really gotten into any trouble by telling the truth. So I decided to just write it and put my name on it and own it. And it's turned out to be a very interesting experience because the opportunity to tell your story in the Times, of course, it's tempting to just turn it into some kind of PR puff stuff, right?

Sure.

But I hate that. I hate reading it. And I don't want to use this incredible piece of luck to just do something stupid like that. So I decided to really write what my life is about and not to tell people, oh, here's. I'm so smart. You should do this. I just tell people what I did. I say, here is my problem. This is what I did. This is how it turned out. And then comment. And because it's an online forum, there was a way for the readers to enter into the dialogue and to add their own thoughts. And it turned out to be really a very, very popular part of the paper. And just A tremendous learning experience for me, because if you've never tried this, just simply writing down a description of your problems is really good way to think about them. If you have to communicate succinctly, here's what's going on. It clarifies your thoughts about it, and it's not just what you put on the paper, but also what you have to leave out. It makes you think about the complexity of problems in a whole different way. So I ended up writing for the Times for more than four years, and then eventually they killed the blog, and that's a long story I don't want to go into, but it ended. And Lauren, my editor, moved on to Forbes, and he's now running the Forbes website, the small business and entrepreneurship coverage. And I write for him occasionally. I don't write as much as I did for the Times just because I don't have as much bandwidth these days to devote to writing.

Sure.

But. But yeah, it was. It was incredible, and it was an incredible piece of luck that put me there. And I gotta say that. Imagine I've got to give a big shout out to the Times because they basically let someone who had no credentials as a journalist and no, you know, no real background in writing access to their. To their paper. You know, like, I got to write for them so that when I wrote something, people paid attention to it. And that was really amazing opportunity.

Yeah, it's great that they recognize the value of being, you know, really hearing your story, not just another, hey, I've done so great, you know.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Yeah.

Yeah. People criticize the Times a lot, but I got to say that that's. That's an amazing piece of institutional imagination on their part.

I agree. Yeah. So I. I'm curious about something that you said. And. And, you know, it's. We know that the path has worked out for you, but, you know, you said at the. At the end of 2008 and even the beginning of 2009, you know, you were just keeping going because business was trickling in. In retrospect, would it have been better to just kill it and start something new? Because I've. We've all been in that. That scenario where business is trickling in. You're like, wait a minute, you know, I'm hanging on by a thread, but it can. Would this energy be worth it somewhere else? So I'm just curious as to your. Your perspective on that.

Well, I gotta say that that sounds like very west coast thinking to me.

I'm an east coast guy, so.

Okay, so I Got it wrong. But, you know, the whole fail fast and to market and all that, that to me is advice that really doesn't translate to most small businesses. And the way most people get into small businesses is, you know, my business is my life and all my fortune is committed to it. And the mere act of trying to extract myself from the current business and get to something else. Your, your, your premise in your remark is that the extraction process is relatively pain free. And that is not going to happen for me. Sure, yeah.

I think all of us.

Yeah, I don't necessarily. I agree with you, in fact, 100% and my history having the same business for 19, almost 20 years attest to that because we've been through periods where we've hung on by a thread. I'm just curious if you feel like I did the right thing. I was looking more for a little validation.

Well, let me put a different spin on it that I think that one of the things that every entrepreneur, every business owner should know is what does failure actually look like? In other words, you define a line that you're not willing to cross. To me, that means basically losing my house. That if I had to sign away my house and I was heading for a situation where someone was going to call that in and I was going to be homeless, then I had to turn around. Now, I have never quite gotten there. I've gotten to within inches of that line, but I never got there. And that's my personal. Don't go past that. I think that every business owner really needs to figure out what they're willing to sacrifice and think about it very clearly. Like, are you willing to sacrifice the health of your personal relationships? Are you willing to sacrifice your own personal health? Are you someone who would rather work an extra four hours and not do that jog or that walk or you're going to hit five whiskeys when you get home, as opposed to not doing that. I mean, everybody's got bad places that they can drift into. And part of being a clear thinker, which is, I think, incredibly important for any business owner, is knowing what that looks like and deciding to stay away from it. And so, as I said, I never got to that moment. And I don't want to say that your decisions that you made were right or wrong, because those were your choices.

Sure. Well, this is why I think the book is so valuable, is because, you know, your perspective is often or is quite different from, you know, a lot of business folks that we, that we talk about where you're willing to really look at that, you know, okay, what. How far am I, you know, willing to go down, you know, the rabbit hole, whether it's debt or whatever. And in your case, you know, your house, which I think gives you an opportunity especially to share it with other business owners, that one of the things that I think struck me, one part in the book where you went to a business roundtable meeting that you had joined and you were explaining how you were having all these problems and these other guys were like, oh, that's ridiculous, we're not having those problems. I often feel the same way where there's often no one around me that I could share. And I'm often fearful, quite frankly, that I'm going to say my business isn't doing very well. And all these other people just like happened in your case, you can say, well, you're screwed up because our businesses are killing it. You read so much about success and all these publications that quite often I think these small business owners are sitting there in a bubble going, what am I doing wrong?

Yes. Although I think that you're slightly mischaracterizing that episode in the book. So what I was talking about was a meeting of my Vistage group, which is fellow small business owners. And that particular group, yes, in this particular instance, they were saying, hey, it's not just the bad economy that's causing your problems, it's you that's causing your problems. But those guys also share their problems with me. And I think that it's really easy, before you've reached out to other business owners to assume that you're just going to run into this wall of, oh, you know, what's the matter with you? Why are you having problems? We never have any problems. And my experience in having communicated with now thousands of small business owners through the times or through the book or just by talking to them, is that once you can say, hey, wait a minute, I have problems. I've never met anybody who didn't have problems also. And part of that is that I don't hang around with the Bill Gates style entrepreneurs. I hang around with the guys who own like a local pizza shop or plumbing distribution, like real businesses. And I think that there's really a tremendous amount of help and support to be gained by talking to your peers as long as you approach it honestly. And I'm sort of amazed that this dialogue doesn't happen more readily or the possibility of it is not more widely acknowledged. But it really seems like a breakthrough concept to say from one business owner to another, hey, I have problems. It's amazing that that's so novel. It shouldn't be. It should be.

I would agree.

Yeah. Well, I mean. And I think that's cultural. I mean, that's America. It's not just the business owners. It's everybody. You know, there's certainly. And perhaps that's an east coast mentality that, you know, that we're all guilty of. Is. Is. It's. It's very easy to just say, oh, yeah, you know, push those down deep and don't worry about them. That's, you know.

Yeah.

It's unhealthy. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. Who wins? Like, who wins?

Nobody. Nobody. Yeah.

If people who are thinking of entering a business have a. An incorrect picture of what it's like, and if people who are running a business feel worse than they should because they have problems, like, who's the winner? There's. And so why can't we talk about these things candidly? It would just help everybody. It would. And I'm amazed that it's not enlightened, that it's not the go to conversation when you're talking about business.

Yeah. And that brings up a question. So we talk about books here all the time, like the E. Myth getting started and what you can expect and how to set up different aspects of your small business. As I was reading the book, it really hit home with me because I felt lots of similar instances. Having been in business for 25 years, would you advise or say that this is a good book for a new business owner to read as well, or is this something where they're going to look at this and go, wow, I'm not sure I can take this, you know.

Well, yes, I mean, it is a good book for a new business owner, but we should probably explain what the book is. I don't think.

Yeah, please. I skipped ahead. Yeah, please do.

Yeah. The book came out of the blog, but it's not a replication of it. So I had been writing for a couple of years, and I was approached by a literary agent, said, do you want to write a book? And I was like, sure, I'll write a book. And, you know, why not? And then. So because it was. I had the possibility then of taking a book to market without a great deal of work on my part. All I had to do was write the book. And so I was like, okay, well, what book have I never read that I want to read? And it's the one which talks about what it's like to experience running a business, not just a bunch of Advice, because there's a zillion books and a lot of them are very good, but, like, what is it like to be me? And I had found in writing for the blog that I was able to touch on a lot of aspects of what my life is like. But I always had to pull a little problem out and write about it in an isolated way. And that is not at all the way my day actually goes generally. I go in in the morning and I've got a list of 10 things I need to do and I start working on them. And by the middle of the morning, five other things have walked in my office door that are problems that need to be dealt with. And at the end of the day, my day is nothing like what I planned it. And it goes like that always. That you have unexpected events and that the running of the business is a narrative. It's kind of like a roller coaster ride. Sometimes you have good days, sometimes you have bad days, and that's what the life is really like. So I wrote a book that was a record of a whole year of my business. What are the challenges I went through? And of course, not every one, because it would be a phone book, but just taking out the narrative of we started off in a pretty good position and then sales collapsed in the spring and what did I do about it and how did I think about it? And then we sort of got out of it at the end of the year. And the value of that, as I've heard from many hundreds of business owners who've contacted me, is just having someone say, yeah, this is what it looks like. And so that they were able to say, oh, when my life looks like that, I don't necessarily need to feel like a failure. That's just what it is. So if you were thinking of running a business and you'd never done it, I think that this would be a very valuable thing to read because you might, you know, it's like, okay, this is a version of what your life is going to look like and you're going to have challenges and prepare yourself because they're real challenges. Yeah.

And I think that, you know, that that 2012 span, I think as you're talking about, I mean, it wasn't even just the narrative, but the detail was really helpful and the cash flow and like, oh, here's how much we have in the bank today. And then at the next chapter, here's how much I have now at the beginning of month. That's the stuff that we all deal with on a daily basis. Is how much cash is the lifeblood of your business. It's powerful. I agree with you. I think it is a great book to read as a new business owner. Much more powerful than. Here's another success story about Paul Downs. Hopefully your next year was great, but this is a powerful snapshot of, hey, this is going to happen to you at some point, and this is how you power through it.

Yeah. And I got to say that I always try to include the numbers in whatever I'm talking about. If I'm talking about what people get paid, I say what they get paid. When I talked about my own business in the Times, eventually I got around to telling everybody how much money I made and just published it right there in the Times because you can't really have real conversations about business without talking about money, and you can't talk about money without talking about numbers. And so it drives me crazy to read advice from people who say, oh, I did so much better with this particular technique. And they don't tell you how much money they were making when they started and how much when they ended. Like, what do you even mean? So I do that in my writing, and that's a big part of the book is including the actual dollar figures of how much we had in the bank. And just in case that sounds like it's the most boring book ever, I hope it's not, because it's a really sort of an interesting story that there was a real story to that year.

It was. And, you know, throughout that, you know, you just kind of. You described challenge after challenge, you know, professionally for your business, but also personally with, you know, which so many of us. You can't have discussion about your small business without including your personal life because it impacts it. And, you know, when I was reading, you know, the challenges you went through, I could just see, you know, so many people, I think, would have just given up, but you just continued to power through the obstacles, which we talk about on the show a lot, you know, and maybe you already answered this, but, you know, what drives you each day or what drove you during that, you know, challenging year to just keep powering through? What was it? Where'd you get the energy to keep moving forward?

Well, I'll tell you, I've been in business 30 years now, and the. I don't want to fail, frankly. That's great. I really don't. And that. That is a large motivator that figure out how to have the doors open tomorrow is probably 50% of success, that if the doors are open Tomorrow, you've made it another day, you're doing okay. And yeah, I have personal challenges that I talk about in the book that I have a son with severe autism and that certainly affects my life. Everybody has personal challenges, you know, whatever flavor it comes in. And again, that's part of the reality of running a business is you can't just pretend that stuff doesn't exist. Now on the flip side, so fear of failure is a motivator, but I've also found enormous satisfaction in actually just doing my business, that I really like the product I make, I really like the people I work with. I get to work. You know, I've hired a great team of craftsmen and designers. I like our customers. We're in a business where people don't buy my product because they're afraid or they, you know, they're forced into it. They only buy it because they want it. So the, the transactions tend to be good. And I really like, have enjoyed the opportunity to build a company that has the kind of culture that I want, which is a place where good, hard working people can come to work and do something good and respect each other and bring home enough money to participate in the American economy as solid middle class citizens. So to the extent that I've been able to do great work with good clients and lead my employees on a path to prosperity, that's really a big motivator to me to keep that going.

Nice. Yeah, very well said. And you were certainly preaching to the choir on this show. I think that's fantastic. So the book focuses on 2012, how things been for you since then, the business, you're still there and doing that good work and creating that culture.

Yeah, still there. 2012, we did about $2.1 million in business. 2013, we went to 2.9. It's a pretty big jump. 2014, 2.75 and 2015. Last year was a little bit difficult. We fell back to two and a half and we're on track to do about three this year. So that span of years is pretty much like any five year span. There was some good ones, there were some bad ones, there were some good days, there were some bad days.

Yeah.

And I'm still here. And I'll be here for good, long while, I hope until I retire or sell the business for sure. That's great.

So, you know, we, we talk about mistakes a lot on this show and you know, we've talked about them here as well. Is, is there something, you know, that, that kind of stands out for you in you Know, when we say the best mistake you might have made, something that you really learned, you know, a great lesson in your business that that happened at some point that you can share with the listeners.

Yeah, I mean, there's so many.

I have the same. Yeah, I have that problem.

Where do you start? But the one that's probably most applicable to all businesses is understanding profitability. And I went for many, many years before I really understood it, because I'm not much of a businessman and not really financially sophisticated. That's not why I got into my line of business. And it's not to say that once I understood it, it became easy to make money. But now, at least I have that as a goal. And I have an understanding of how my business does make money. And I think that anybody who's running a business, particularly if you're starting a business, the first question would be, who's going to pay me on an ongoing basis for whatever I'm selling? How do I get people to continually send me money? And then the second one would be, how do I take that stream of cash and provide whatever I'm promising to provide and have some leftover at the end of the day? And if you can answer those two questions, you're on your way.

That's great.

That's good advice. I feel like it's important for everyone at your business to at least understand that those are the questions that you as a business owner and you as their employer need to answer. Because I've had some people that don't quite groke that the goal is to create something of such value that the same person wants to pay for it over and over again. And that's a key thing, that if people that work for you don't get it, they might not be able to stay working for you.

Well, I'd say that one aspect of that is how candid are you with your employees about how the business works. I spent the first quarter century in my business basically being the only one in the room who understood the numbers. And I internalized quite a lot of stress because of that. And then after I started writing for the Times, I realized, hey, sharing information about my life is not going to kill me. And I started sharing the numbers with my employees, in other words, telling them how much money we had on the bank in any given day and how much had come in and how much was going out and how much money I took home. And it was really an eye opener for them because they had no idea. They just had no concept of what kind of Money was involved. And once I was willing to share that information with them, they started thinking about the business in a whole different way. So now that we all at least understand theoretically what should happen, we can have a mature discussion about how we're doing and why they may or may not be able to have that raise or we can or can't buy this piece of equipment or anything, really. Now they're informed and so that my dialogue with them can be much more productive.

Yeah, yeah. It's not so much just a mature conversation, but like you said, an informed, mature conversation. Yeah.

Now, I don't think that every business owner should necessarily assume they have to do this, but in my business, we have employees who I plan to have employed for a long time. They make a commitment to the company as much as I make a commitment to them. And so that the health of the company and the health of the employees is basically the same thing. Now, if I was running an ice cream stand and I hired a bunch of high school kids for three months every summer, I wouldn't bother to share numbers with them because they're not going to be around. And every business is different and every business owner has to make a decision that makes sense for them.

That's great. Yeah. It's a fascinating story and one that I really thank you for sharing with all of us because it's very valuable and I will continue to mention it here on the show and we will link it often and whenever we mention it. What's the best way for folks to learn more about your business?

Well, about my business, they can just Google Paul Downs. That's P, A, U L D O W N S. And I am not the Italian actor. I'm the guy who makes conference tables should be able to tell us apart. And. And if they get on my website, they'll learn more than they ever wanted to about conference tables. And if you're looking for the book, it's called Boss Life Surviving My own Small Business and it's available at most bookstores and online. If you Google that, you'll find sources for it.

Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining us today. It's been fascinating and I. I definitely appreciate your time at odavest as well.

Yeah.

Well, thanks, gentlemen. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I enjoyed talking to you.

Very good. Paul Downs, everybody. Pick up a copy of Boss Life and you will reap the benefits for sure.

Thanks for joining us, Paul. This was fun. Thanks everybody for listening. You know where you can find us? Of course. BusinessShow Co on the web and on Facebook at facebook.com business/,//business show. We'd love to hear from you. And we will hear from you. You will hear from us next. Next week. Have a good Keep living that charmed life.